1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the medical arts, and more particularly to a method of providing a plurality of I.V. bottles with sterile caps.
2. Description of the Prior Art
I.V. bottles are generally furnished to hospitals with a measured amount of dry powder or liquid inside the bottle. The hospital itself adds a dilutant to the powder inside the bottle, or adds powder where the bottle initially contains a liquid, so that its contents can be administered intravenously to a patient. The amount of dilutant or powder added to each bottle is determined by the particular patient needs.
Preparation of the I.V. bottles is typically done at a centralized laboratory facility removed from the patient areas of the hospital. In order to keep the bottles sterile from the time dilutant is added until the fluid is administered to a patient, a temporary sterile cap is placed over the bottle once the desired amount of dilutant has been added. The bottle is then transported to the patient, where the temporary cap is removed and the I.V. fluid administered.
In order to avoid contamination, dilutant is added to the bottle and the temporary cap is affixed within the confines of a sterile, laminar flow hood. The temporary caps are provided individually, each cap having a paper wrapping heat-sealed over its opening to keep the inside of the cap sterile. When the cap is ready to be used, the paper is peeled off and discarded. Thus, a separate package must be opened each time an I.V. bottle is filled. While this does not pose any particular problem if only one or a few I.V bottles are needed, the demands on many modern hospitals are such that a very large volume of bottles must be supplied on a continuous basis. The need to unwrap a separate temporary cap for each of these bottles can be quite time consuming and adds to the demands made on the laboratory staff, in addition to tying up the laminar flow hood and restricting its availability for other purposes. The discarded wrapping for each cap also results in an accumulation of a large volume of litter over a period of time.
The method commonly used to affix the temporary caps to their respective I.V. bottles is also time consuming and can contribute to an overall reduction in efficiency for the hospital laboratory. Each I.V. bottle and its corresponding temporary cap is typically considered to comprise a unit; the preparation of one unit will be completed before work on the next unit begins. That is, even if there is more than one I.V. bottle within the hood, a single temporary cap will be unwrapped and affixed to a bottle by press-fitting it over the bottle neck before another cap is unwrapped. After the first bottle has been capped, one more cap is unwrapped and then pressed over the second bottle. When this is complete a third cap is unwrapped, and so on. Alternately, a number of caps may be individually unwrapped before capping the bottles. While either technique may be satisfactory for small scale production, they again consume a significant amount of preparation time when employed in the context of a large hospital with many patients. Furthermore, physically pressing a large number of temporary caps onto I.V. bottles has been found to bruise or otherwise irritate the palm of the I.V. technician or I.V. pharmacist who performs the operation.